Until the end of the year, Benjamin Biolay brings his latest album to the stage, the double Disque Bleu, born of two years around the world, from Rio to Paris, from Sète to Buenos Aires. Meeting with a versatile artist who has not forgotten his dreams.
Twenty-five years after his dazzling debut, the dust settles and his portrait emerges, beyond appearances, from his image of a nonchalant dandy, his outbursts, his loves on glossy paper. What remains is elegance, depth, perseverance, and a poetry that illuminates his Disque Bleu. Blue like the sea, like the sky seen from an airplane, airplanes that, like him, crisscross the world, from France to Brazil or Argentina, where Benjamin Biolay lives part of the year. This album in two parts subtitled Residents and then Visitors, his true identity, thus depicts a planet where it becomes difficult to feel at home: “These political undertones reflect my anger at the rise of racism, in France as elsewhere. Born long after the war, my generation still bore the scars, with a urgent need for it not to happen again. But people have forgotten. In the United States, ICE, which is nothing but a fascist militia in a pseudo-democracy, has nothing to envy what happened during the Yellow Vests. Except that they don’t shoot people in the head with war weapons, but we’re getting close. It’s the culmination of a horrific rise of fascisms. In Argentina, President Milei has fans, but many hate him to an unimaginable extent. People argue a lot within families, among themselves: he creates a kind of incredibly crazy discord, similar to Trumpism.”
Benjamin Biolay’s music stands in opposition to discord, a refuge perhaps to find a form of beauty: “It’s a quest. The rage is no less strong within me, when I make songs, but I am no longer a citizen, I am myself. I am a savage.” Author, composer, musician, producer, actor, and for the first time this year, director of a documentary on the songs of Georges Brassens, he achieved his double album in two years, 24 songs in an hour and a half on a sumptuous 33 RPM, a phantasmagorical object imagined by the artists M/M.
“The rage is no less strong, when I make songs, but I am no longer a citizen, I am myself. I am a savage.”
This story unfolds like a film on several continents: “I often start from a memory. It’s not fluid, it’s not simple. When it’s necessary to transform the music into a screenplay, it’s a bit of the moment of great struggles where we fight with ourselves.” He puts a lot of humor in it and mocks, for example in the song “Mauvais Garçon,” all the things that have been stuck to his back: “Yes, I don’t care and I make fun of it. More precisely, it hasn’t reached my soul. When I sing ‘half soldier, half monk,’ it’s neither one nor the other. The principle is not to know exactly where we’re going or under what conditions. What still makes me want to write songs is to delve into my interior. Composition is more mysterious, music is close to dream. Sometimes, I come out of ten days in the studio, without knowing how it happened. It’s a bit magical, as if I had dreamed the recording.”
In “Mes Vols,” one of the musician’s favorite books, Jean Mermoz writes: “Modern life allows travels, but does not provide adventure.” Biolay, on the other hand, embarked on a creative adventure by writing the Residents part in France and the Visitors part in South America. The aeropostale that he admires so much deeply influenced this album: “I have a very intimate connection with Saint-Exupéry. I was in the same high school as him, and I got kicked out like him. Being a bit of an Argentine citizen, I come across the names of these pioneers on every street corner. In Buenos Aires, they are very present. People are still grateful for the window they opened to the rest of the world, crossing the impossible and colossal Andes mountains, at the risk of many lives. The Mermoz, Saint-Ex, Guillaumet were complete madmen, fakirs.”
In his own way of throwing himself into the void: the stage. His Disque Bleu, which comes to life in the form of acoustic recitals and electric concerts this summer and until the end of 2026, also pays tribute to Brazilian music – he recorded part of it in Rio: “There, I was amazed to see so much music everywhere. A way of life. Between the baile funk that comes at night from the favelas, the bossanova or samba musicians in the bars, or the batucada percussion, it never stops.”
(Full article available in the new issue of TIME France, available at newsstands.)
